Havergal Brian on Music: Volume I: British Music

Havergal Brian (1876 to 1972) was not only Britain’s most prolific symphonist (he composed 32); he was also a comparative productive musical journalist. His articles, reviews, editorials, personality profiles and columns of comment on contemporary events – sometimes pseudonymous, often unsigned – reveal him as a highly perceptive if sometimes idiosyncratic observer, with a startling breadth of interest and a fund of personal reminiscence, many of whose insights were well in advance of his time. This first volume of selections of his writings brings together many of Brian’s principal writings on the composers and events of the British Musical Renaissance – from polemical articles written when actively campaigning for his fellow-composers in the Midlands before World War I to more considered appraisals of the inter-War period.